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I have just published a four-part series for SQLPerformance.com on the Halloween Problem. Some of you will never have heard of this issue, and those that have might associate it only with T-SQL UPDATE queries. In fact, the Halloween problem affects execution plans for INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and MERGE statements. This is a topic I have been ...

Most tuning efforts for data-changing operations concentrate on the SELECT side of the query plan. Sometimes people will also look at important storage engine considerations like locking and transaction log throughput that can have dramatic effects. As a consequence, a number of common practices have emerged, such as avoiding large numbers of ...

From time to time, I encounter a system design that always issues an UPDATE against the database after a user has finished working with a record – without checking to see if any of the data was in fact altered. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that “the database will sort it out”. This raises an interesting question: how smart is SQL ...